Site Mobile Navigation

Brazil’s Antidoping Lab Reborn as the Olympics Near

RIO DE JANEIRO — The drug-testing laboratory that will handle samples during this summer’s Rio Games was shaped by what happened at the last Olympics.

During the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, according to an independent report commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, officials at a Moscow lab destroyed the samples of Russian athletes with the help of federal police. The report led to the suspension of Russian track and field athletes from global competition, and the lab in question lost its certification.

“It’s an extraordinary manual of what not to do,” said Marco Aurelio Klein, national secretary of the Brazilian Doping Control Authority. “We reviewed all of our procedures after reading it.”

Last year at this time, Brazil’s antidoping laboratory was fighting to regain its own international certification. Now, as fresh blue paint dries on the doors of a multimillion-dollar facility here, officials say the lab is ready to process thousands of drug tests for the Summer Olympics.

It took roughly 200 million Brazilian real, or about $60 million, to get there. Even in the face of a pronounced recession, government money has poured into outfitting three floors of labs at the federal university here with new scientific equipment and speckled-marble countertops. That money has also gone toward training 96 technicians to collect and test blood and urine samples.

That investment earned the lab reaccreditation from WADA last year. The facility had lost its certification in 2013, forcing authorities to outsource drug testing to a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

Francisco Radler de Aquino Neto, a chemical scientist and the director of the Rio facility, said the lab was preparing to host 100 additional technicians assigned by WADA during the Olympics.

“We need to do one year’s worth of analysis in three weeks, with 24-hour timelines,” he said. “The lab is going to swell during the Games.”

This year’s Olympic drug-testing operation may face particular scrutiny and security because of what happened in Russia. It is still unknown whether Russia will be allowed to send track and field athletes to compete in Rio; that decision rests with the sport’s governing body. The newly banned drug meldonium, meanwhile, has surfaced in tests of Russian athletes across sports.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

But doping among Brazilian athletes is also of concern as the Summer Games approach. According to new numbers released by WADA last week, Brazil ranked ninth of 109 countries in doping violations in 2014, with 46 infractions. (Russia was first with 148.)

Mr. Klein said fighting doping in a nation as large as Brazil was difficult.

“A growth of positive tests means you are improving,” he said of having uncovered more violations than in past years.

He noted that Brazil had not previously conducted doping tests outside competition and that such tests now made up about 40 percent of the lab’s work.

“We’re going beyond the recommendations,” he said.

In the years leading up to its decertification, the Rio lab fell behind international standards, Mr. Klein said, because of how rapidly and sharply standards changed.

“We had a lab that was born in a classroom in 1989, for the America Cup,” he said. “That was 10 years before WADA existed, five years before any antidoping code existed.”

Mr. Klein credited “very firm support” from the federal government as critical to overhauling the country’s operations to be ready for the Olympics.

“People imagine the president doesn’t have the time, with everything that’s going on,” he said of Dilma Rousseff, who is facing impeachment amid a sweeping graft scandal. “But in fact, late at night, we went to the president in the middle of this crisis, and we got her signature on a presidential decree.”

That late-night signature, in March, helped to bring Brazil’s policies in line with international doping rules, enabling the creation of a single national tribunal for doping cases across sports and preserving the lab’s certification for the Summer Games.

But beyond the Olympics, Mr. Klein called the lab an asset to Rio de Janeiro and the broader region. With the exception of Colombia, no neighboring country has an accredited antidoping facility.

“Most labs can’t keep up with the speed of technological innovations,” he said, citing the high cost.

He motioned proudly to the machinery surrounding him at the laboratory complex, beside a research center for Petrobras, the national oil company at the center of the scandal involving the president and others.

"Today,” he said, “we have everything we need to carry out our work for the Games.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 3, 2016, on Page B11 of the New York edition with the headline: Brazil’s Antidoping Lab Reborn as Olympics Near. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe